Covina-based Rocketlane, a professional services software platform, announced in June it raised $24 million in series B funding. The round was co-led by Nexus Venture Partners, 8VC and Matrix Partners India, bringing total fundraising to $45 million.
The company was started by Srikrishnan Ganesan, Deepak Bala and Vignesh Girishankar. The trio previously founded the software-as-a-service startup Konotor, which was later acquired by service platform Freshworks.
After their tenure at Freshworks, they began analyzing bottlenecks professional services teams had to grapple with – working on a project for a client often means shuffling between many platforms purpose-built for one thing: project documents, email threads, time-tracking platforms, budget spreadsheets or resource planning products. Tracking projects through multiple platforms means spending time on data entry, making sure the same values are accounted for across all software, and can lead to delays if the team isn’t on top of how much of the budget is being spent.
“There would be a lot of value in offering an all-in-one solution that ties together your actual delivery and collaboration software with the back end of it, the time tracking, resource planning and the proper accounting element,” Ganesan, Rocketlane’s chief executive, said.
Rocketlane launched in 2020 and has since broadened its capabilities from a customer onboarding platform to span the entirety of the professional services industry. The startup has amassed over 500 customers, including OpenGov, Fivetran and Zenoti.
The fresh funding will help the company onboard more leadership into the company and expand further into Europe.
Rocketlane is also looking to incorporate artificial intelligence tools into its platform. These include email and project document templates, using insights from client meetings to temperature test how the client is feeling about certain projects, and using intelligence from past projects to learn how to operate differently or more efficiently in the future.
SaaS technology has been the darling of Silicon Valley for a few decades. While consumer-facing technology has long been popular – such as Apple’s consumer products like the iPhone and MacBook – investors quickly pinpointed enterprise technology’s capability to net more profitable returns at a faster rate. Recently, amid market fluctuations and valuation slashing, the enterprise technology underpinning the aerospace sector, banking industry and health care verticals have been considered a safe bet for investors.
Much of the growth in SaaS products came from product-led-growth, a strategy the likes of Slack and Dropbox built their success on that often forwent professional services departments at first. But as PLG companies grow into onboarding larger enterprise clients, they are at risk of failing to deliver without professional services teams to help onboard and understand necessary features. Venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz found in 2022 that sales-led companies are an average of 7% more profitable than PLG-led public companies.
“There are only so many companies that are truly PLG whenever someone starts going up market. Serving a bigger market in enterprise it automatically becomes a different kind of system,” Ganesan said.
But while Slack, Zoom and Sourcegraph have risen in popularity for filling gaps in the market, one area that doesn’t get much attention is professional services.
“The team that’s actually delivering on the promise that a salesperson makes to the client, the team that’s making that a reality and is under pressure to make it a reality, haven’t gotten enough limelight,” Ganesan said. “We are building software for those teams.”
